Telemarketing continues to be one of the most effective channels for businesses to generate qualified leads and enhance returns. The success rate, however, varies. The question is, what’s the secret sauce that bridges the gap between a mediocre and outstanding campaign? Answering the question, in this blog post, we discuss three research areas that will help you fare better at telemarketing and make the most from your efforts.
Why Data Is The Backbone For Any Telemarketing Campaign?
Relevant data helps telemarketing agents make decisions on who their target market is, what methods work best, market trends, and more! Cold calling lists are much more successful when an agent understands the importance of what the data is saying.
1. Target Market
Cold calling using untargeted lists loaded with random contact numbers is a rookie mistake. Before kicking off a telemarketing campaign, it is essential to conduct thorough market research to understand the needs of target customers. Leveraging research data to streamline your campaign gives you a definite edge over your competitors. Let’s look at some of the focus areas of Market Research.
Data Quality
A telemarketing database and calling infrastructure may not be enough to start your telemarketing campaign. Even if you know how to pitch your product in the best possible way, you need targeted prospects.
Market Selection
Effective decision making relies on data instead of assumptions. Therefore, every telemarketing campaign needs a data-driven reason to select a specific market before investing in a telemarketing campaign.
Competitor Analysis
Analyzing your competitors can help you determine the attributes that can attract your target customers. The analysis must cover your competitors’ products, profitability, growth pattern, current and past strategies, organizational structure, revenue model, and sales numbers. The analysis can also help you determine the best practices for brand development.
Buyer Hooks
People have short attention spans during cold calls, and therefore, the introduction of the product must be interesting enough to command their attention. The sales script should include all the elements that may attract a customer, which is possible only by understanding and addressing their needs or pain points.
2. Data Composition
Your telemarketing database can have vague information of the prospects, missing certain attributes such as geography, income, or area code. Therefore, optimizing your telemarketing database to include all bits of missing information is imperative before attempting cold calls. Some critical elements of data composition include:
Job Role
A telemarketing campaign should have a fair idea of the buyer’s purchasing power before pitching the product to minimize the wastage of time and efforts.
Referral Opportunities
Referrals, or word of mouth, are largely attributable for the success of most products and services that have gone viral. Therefore, every business needs to find out the untapped potential of willing customers who can promote its services.
3. Value Proposition
A popular product stays on top, as it continues providing value year after year to its customers. Therefore, it is important to convey the value of the offer in the right manner, which can be done by elaborating how your product or service can help. Creating a value proposition involves answering three questions: “what’s the product”, “who is the intended user” and “what’s the utility”. A unique value proposition tells the customer about the problem addressed by your product, and why they must choose you over your competitor. The value offered must be clear even before you pitch the cost of your product.
The Way Forward
The b2b telemarketing industry can hide a lot of pitfalls. One of the most common is getting past the gatekeepers. Devising a strategy to weed out the gatekeepers to reach the decision-making authority during cold calling makes a significant difference in the agents' success. Even with the right research in place, for your campaign to be a success, your sales reps must be ready to answer any questions of prospective customers, which calls for proper training. Telephonelists.biz helps your business grow by providing a professionally managed telemarketing database of qualified leads, enabling you to scale your business through telemarketing. If you have any questions or wish to learn more about our list generation services, feel free to reach us at 1.888.981.3099 or 1.972.713.6622.